Judge Kelly Rose must have seen the writing on the wall.
On Dec. 5, she released Clifton Harris from having to come to court anymore to explain whether he could afford to make payments on the bill he owed Lafayette County for the time he spent there in jail.
Harris owes the county more than $2,000 stemming from a misdemeanor he pleaded guilty to in 2016. He was accused of throwing a rock through the window of a police car parked in a lot. After Harris was released from jail, Rose called him back month after month for payment review hearings. When he missed a hearing, he went back to jail, and his debt to the county grew.
Rose’s decision came two weeks after I wrote about Harris’ case.
A few days after Rose released Harris from his court obligations, the Court of Appeals in the Western District of Missouri determined that the practice of using the courts to try to collect board bills is illegal. Ruling in another case in which Rose sought to collect a board bill for jail time, a three-judge panel of the appeals court ruled unanimously on Tuesday that “nothing in (state law) provides specific authorization for the taxation of an unpaid board bill as a court cost.”
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That means that judges in Missouri can no longer threaten defendants with jail time if they can’t afford to pay the board bills issued to them by the sheriff.
“This is huge,” says former Missouri Supreme Court Justice and dean emeritus of the St. Louis University School of Law Mike Wolff. “It’s very clear the court is treating board bills as a debt, which they clearly are.”
The decision, if it stands, in effect ends a debtors prison scheme that has been common in rural counties throughout the state.
The case was brought by Matthew Mueller, the senior bond litigation counsel for the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office, on behalf of John Wright, a Higginsville man who was sentenced to 90 days in jail for failing to pay for a taxicab ride. Wright, who suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was 19, was given a $1,300 board bill for his time in jail.
As is common in many counties in Missouri, Rose ordered Wright to appear month after month for show-cause hearings, or payment review hearings.
There is nothing in the state statute that allows defendants to be billed for jail time that allows this type of collection process, Mueller argued. The American Civil Liberties Union agreed, filing a brief in the case saying that the practice violates Missouri’s constitutional prohibition against jailing people for debt.
“The entire practice is unlawful and must cease,” Mueller wrote in his brief on the Wright case.
The court agreed.
“The term ‘show-cause hearings’ is never mentioned (in the key sections of law) and is therefore not the proper method by which to collect costs,” Appeals Court Judge Thomas Newton wrote on behalf of the court. Judges Alok Ahuja and Mark Pfeiffer concurred with his opinion. “Based on the trial court’s adoption of a procedure which lacked statutory authorization, we grant point one and reverse the trial court’s ruling on the motion to retax.”
Mueller was happy with the court’s opinion.
“We are pleased with the outcome,” he said. “We think the court of appeals reached the right result.”
But his work is hardly done.
He has several other cases going forward before the three Missouri appeals courts, including a couple that argue that some counties are, in effect, double dipping in felony cases by billing the state for board bill costs, and then also billing indigent clients for the same costs when they get out of prison.
If Tuesday’s ruling isn’t appealed, it means that the practice of holding defendants liable for board bills — often the most expensive cost related to criminal cases — will come to an immediate end.
That means dozens of indigent defendants throughout the state should have their hearings canceled. Call it an early Christmas present.
Caldwell County Associate Circuit Court Judge Jason Kanoy, one of the most persistent practitioners of using the court system to collect board bills, has about 50 such hearings on his docket this Thursday. Dent County Associate Circuit Court Judge Brandi Baird, who lost her November election over this issue, has dozens more defendants scheduled for payment review hearings on Dec. 20.
The Missouri Appeals Court of the Western District says that all of those hearings — to the extent they exist to collect board bills — should be vacated.
The law says counties can send the bills to collection, but they can’t threaten people with jail simply because they are poor and can’t pay the bill.
For years, the judicial system in too many Missouri counties has been allowing itself to be hijacked by county commissioners seeking to use the courts as a debt collector. On Tuesday morning, the Missouri judicial system did what it is supposed to do: It corrected itself.
Jailed for being poor is Missouri epidemic: A series of columns from Tony Messenger
Tony Messenger has written about Missouri cases where people were charged for their time in jail or on probation, then owe more money than their fines or court costs.
The Pulitzer Prize board considered these columns when it decided to award the prize for commentary to metro columnist Tony Messenger.
In a twist of irony, one judge no longer calls them “payment review hearings.” Instead, he’s even more direct. Now they are called “debt colle…
“The jail is emptying out. People that do come in are able to bond out quickly. None of the girls here are being held for financial reasons. T…
In a case of civil contempt — such as when a judge jails a reporter for not revealing a source, or an attorney for failing to follow an order …
Even with the state’s top court making progress in eradicating the practice of putting people in jail because they can’t afford to be in jail,…
“There are a pile of cases where people owe us money,” the judge told the defendant, a painter, who said he was having a hard time finding wor…
No longer, the court said in one voice, can judges in Missouri threaten indigent defendants with jail time for their inability to be able to a…
Disparate treatment of people charged with crimes offers a glimpse into a fundamental problem in the application of criminal justice in Missou…
Weiss wants the Legislature to make it illegal for counties to charge defendants for their time behind bars.
“How can they cancel a court date then issue a warrant without even telling you the new court date?” Sharp wonders.
His bill would stop the practice in Missouri of state police agencies avoiding state jurisdiction by seeking asset forfeiture under guise of f…
"He sat in jail because he was poor," public defender Matthew Mueller said of his client.
The two defendants are Exhibits A and B of why Missouri has become the front line in a national war on poverty and the courts.
She knows what she did was wrong. She knows she should have been punished.
“It's been a hard road,” she told me recently. “Really hard.”
For decades, Missouri’s corrections budget has been rising. So has its prison population, with a “tough on crime” philosophy filling prisons w…
“We’re hamstringing the very people who we want to go out and get a job,” Lummus says. “It’s self-defeating.”
In his regular appearance on the McGraw Milhaven show on KTRS radio, Metro columnist Tony Messenger discusses his ongoing debtors' prison series.
He did his time. Then he got the bill: $3,150 for his stay behind bars.
A year-end update on some of the cases Tony Messenger wrote about during 2018.
The primary difference between the poor people who have been “terrorized” in Edmundson or Jennings or Ferguson, compared with those in Salem a…
The Court of Appeals in the Western District of Missouri determined that the practice of using the courts to try to collect board bills is ill…
Some counties in Missouri don't charge board bills. Those include the most urban counties in the state: both the city and county of St. Louis,…
I did my time and then some. This is how they get people. They keep them on probation and then if they don't pay their board bill they violate…
By 2009, Rapp was behind in her payments and the court revoked her probation. She did a couple of days in jail and her cash bond of $400 was a…
Every week in Missouri, a judge somewhere holds a crowded docket to collect room and board from people who were recently in jail. The judges c…
“I don’t see why he has to keep going to court every month,” she says. Sharon uses her Social Security income to try to keep him out of jail. …
Because Precious Jones was late to jail, prosecutor and judge seek to add to her sentence.
The Missouri Supreme Court and Missouri Legislature should revisit their 2015 and 2016 efforts to reform courts. More work is necessary.
Other than now being required to meet federal standards for that drug testing, private probation companies face nearly no oversight in Missour…
“I messed up on probation,” he says. “It was my fault.” Still, he doesn’t think it makes sense that he’s still hauled to court once a month wi…
Murr owed Dent County about $4,000 for her “board bill” for the 95 days she had been jailed.
The domestic violence victim, Gaddis says, wouldn’t make a report to police because she feared going to jail herself and losing her child.
“They make you jump through hoops,” Bote says, “and then they keep moving the hoops higher.”
William Everts stole from a church. Almost immediately, he knew it was a bad idea.
Bergen has the sort of back story that would inspire one of the movies or television episodes based in the Ozarks that seem to be all the rage…
Clark ended up spending 495 days in county jail awaiting a trial that still hasn’t come.
Pritchett first called me last year, after I wrote about a St. Francois County woman who was sent to prison for failing to pay court costs. He…
Rob Hopple had been in jail since May after falling behind on payments on an ankle bracelet. Court dates kept coming and going, with the prose…
The bills are that high because the two criminal defendants couldn’t afford to pay for an initial sentence behind bars for relatively minor of…
“The practical reality is that people are being arrested for being poor,” Mueller says. “And there’s nothing they can do about it. They just s…
At least twice in recent years, the Missouri Supreme Court has overturned harsh sentences issued by a judge after she sent people to prison so…
Branson, in early 2018, was in Desloge, Mo., now, living with her 15-year-old son, checking in with her parole officer, hoping never to go bac…
Officially, Victoria Branson’s probation was revoked because she never paid the state the past due support and the court costs, which rang up …